Henry Moore was a sculptor with pretty traditional sensibilities, which was all well and good during his prime back in the twentieth century….but now? Not so much.

Early in his career, Moore frequented the British Museum, having said that studying the institution’s ancient and Classical collections impacted his own work more than his schooling did. He especially admired the works of ancient Egypt and, like Georges Seurat in his early work Bathers at Asnières, attempted to translate the monumentality of the ancients into the new possibilities encapsulated by modernism. Moore swears that ancient Egyptian imagery of pharaohs, more than anything else, inspired his approach to King and Queen.

But another, more contemporary event, might have also inspired the statute’s monarchical theme. Moore finished the original version of the sculpture in 1953, which was the same year as the coronation of England’s newest monarch Elizabeth II. Coincidence? I think not. After the horrors of World War II, when the United States was becoming totally immersed in its obsession with Abstract Expressionism, our friends across the pond were finding comfort in the stability of the British throne. There was an uptick in patriotic fervor, and a New Elizabethan Age began as Elizabeth II entered into power. Moore’s sculptural works, which evoked the ideas of timelessness and permanence by harking back to ancient Egypt, also seemed to remark on the current desire to feel safe again in the post-war climate. Moore’s sculpture was received well by the English public at the time, who saw Elizabeth II as a beacon of strength.

Contemporary viewers, on the other hand, are quick to scoff at the trust that Moore and his mid-century society placed in the crown. The current situation has bred some pretty bad vibes, and it’s much cooler to be edgy, contemporary, and critical, rather than timeless and inspired by ancient civilizations. This became abundantly clear in 1995, when one of seven casts of this sculpture was brutally vandalized. Henry Keswick proudly displayed King and Queen in his sculpture garden at his Glenkiln estate in Dumfriesshire, Scotland – a collection that also included other sculptural giants like Auguste Rodin. After forty years of peacefully existing in his open-air collection, vandals used saws to behead the bronze monarchs, sending a clear message about contemporary distaste for the monarchy, as no other sculptures were harmed.

Almost a decade later, a 2004 Henry Moore exhibition at Tate Modern went almost completely unnoticed compared to the commercially-driven, conceptual shenanigans that contemporary artist Paul McCarthy was staging outside. Today, Moore could be perceived as old-fashioned and steeped in a dying tradition. Even in King and Queen, we see a female figure who is physically smaller and posed in a subservient manner to her male counterpart. The times are certainly a-changin’.